Ebenber.

Ebenber 25 in the year 2309 is what would have been Christmas Day, until the Ebenistas came along and overthrew the old religion, killing their calendar as a humiliating afterthought.

Clad in half-blue and half-red, thousands of Eben's adherents took to the streets of Rome in the latter days of the 23rd century, intent on tipping the Pope out of his gilded cart and turning his face into the dirt with the soles of their boots.

But Rome did not fall easily - the cardinals had to be shaken out of their aesthetic splendour like salt from a cellar, and the debilitating, drawn-out process took a decade or more. The wall of hired, sinewy muscle drafted in on the minimum wage to fight Catholicism's battles was capable of administering a nasty blow from a meaty fist or a short-range weapon. Even God Himself needs the assistance of a thug with thick forearms from time to time.

Every day the same staging of the same conflict under the same conditions - two great, lumbering beasts locked together in an orgasmic, static rage. It was not sheer military might or weight of numbers that turned the war away from the established church, but the zeal of the new order which had yet to become embedded; which was not yet such a part of the common vernacular that its propagation was guaranteed to be handed down with conception.